[solved] Grub hangs (after kernel update?)

[Charles Curley]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 09:23:29PM -0400, Tony Nelson wrote:
> At 6:21 PM -0400 10/17/06, Tony Nelson wrote:
> >Today my previously working FC5 Linux won't boot.  I see the word "GRUB"
> >alone on the screen, which IIRC means that grub can't find stage 2 (or
> >stage 1.5).
> >
> >Yesterday I yum updated to kernel.i686 2.6.18-1.2200.fc5, ...
> 
> >FC5 boots by chaining from NTLDR's boot.ini, using a file made from the
> >boot sector of my boot partition (/dev/hde3 or (hd0,2)). ...
> 
> >/boot is EXT3 ... /boot is 87% full.
> 
> >I ... (re-)ran grub-install, which said it succeeded.
> 
> >What should I try next?
> 
> After reading "info grub" "* Images ::", which mentions that stage 1 "just
> knows" where to find the next stage, I copied the (new) bootsector to a
> file and replaced the chaining file used by NTLDR.  FC5 now boots.  I don't
> know why the next stage moved (probably e2fs_stage1_5), but it may be
> related to installing the new kernel and to the partition approaching full
> (?).

For what it's worth, I just hit the same problem on applying the new
kernel (2200), and applied the same solution before searching the
archives and finding this thread. I have not seen this problem with
other updates.

My /boot is not as full as yours (assuming yours is the standard
~100MB), and anyway I can't see how that would affect things (but I
could be wrong).

	[root at dragon ~]# df /boot/
	Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
	/dev/hda3              79M   29M   47M  38% /boot

Is there something peculiar to the way this kernel operates that
caused this? I don't think this is due to grub, as I don't see any
grub upgrades in my yum.log*.

http://www.charlescurley.com/Lenovo.R51.html

Tony, have you filed a bug on this? I don't see one but may not have
used the correct search keywords or some such.

Yet another reason to keep a rescue CD handy.

-- 

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